TWIN FALLS, Idaho — When J.D. Davis, the department chair of English at Twin Falls High School, was told last year that half of the committee he was leading to pick new texts and materials for the district’s English Language Arts classrooms would be parents and community members, he objected.

“I said, ‘I’m not going to have parents involved! They don’t know what we’re doing. They don’t know what we need in a textbook as far as curriculum.’ I kind of scoffed at it,” said Davis, who also teaches journalism, oversees the school newspaper and advises the Gay-Straight Alliance.

A new Idaho law gave him no choice.

Across the U.S., educators typically lead textbook selections, although many districts, like Twin Falls, have long included parents in the process. Idaho’s “District Curricular Adoption Committees” law makes parent involvement mandatory — and then some — demanding districts form committees of at least 50 percent non-educators, including parents of current students, to review and recommend new texts and materials.

A year in, the law is reshaping what is or isn’t in the curriculum in many counties in this Western state, including how subjects like climate change or social movements are discussed in some courses.

It has spurred tough but positive parent-school discussions in Twin Falls where parents and educators say the conversations have forced them to consider one another’s concerns and perspectives. In other districts, however, it’s poised to harden divisions and keep students from getting learning tools they need.

Related: Inside Florida’s ‘underground lab’ for far-right policies

Around the country, curricula — books and materials that guide but don’t define lessons — have become a political target of conservatives who fear conflict with values they want to instill in their children. Over the past two years, 147 “parental rights” bills were introduced in state legislatures, according to a legal tracker by the education think tank FutureEd.

Only a handful passed. Many restrict discussions around race and gender. Several enforce parents’ ability to review texts and materials. A 2022 Georgia “Parents’ Bill of Rights” requires that schools provide parents access to classroom and assigned materials within three days of a request. The Idaho curriculum law, embraced by the state’s conservative legislature, went into effect in July 2022.

The curriculum law is noteworthy because it gives non-educators more power not just to inspect curriculum, but to help choose it.

Some educators view it as a political move to undercut their professional role. “The parent partnership is important,” said Peggy Hoy, an instructional coach in the Twin Falls district and the National Education Association director for Idaho. “The problem is when you make a rule like they did and there is this requirement, it feels as an educator that the underlying reason is to drive a wedge between the classroom and parents.”

Sally Toone, a recently retired state representative and veteran teacher who opposed the law, sees it as a legislative move by conservatives “to have parents be a driver, instead of a partner, in the educational process.”

Educators also voiced practical considerations. It can be tough for districts to find parents to devote time to curriculum review. Many have had to scramble, Hoy and others said. Only three non-educators agreed to serve on a math curriculum committee in Twin Falls, which meant that only three educators could participate — fewer than half the optimal number, said the educator who led the committee. Ditto for a science curriculum committee in Coeur D’Alene.

“My family and I are very religious. My biggest concern as a father was, ‘What are my children going to be reading?’ ”

Chris Reid, a father of seven who served on the committee to select a new English Language Arts curriculum for the Twin Falls School District

Having many non-educators involved also changes how materials are judged. Educators want to know, for example, if lessons are clear and organized, and whether they connect to prior learning and support students of differing levels. By contrast, “parents don’t understand the pedagogy of what happens in a curriculum,” said Hoy. They “look at the stories, the word problems, the way they are explaining it.”

Rep. Judy Boyle, a Republican state legislator who sponsored the law, initially agreed to an interview but did not respond to several requests to arrange it.

Related: Population booms overwhelm schools in the West: ‘Someone’s going to get left behind’

During the review process in Twin Falls, a district with 9,300 students in southern Idaho, parents objected to a theme around peaceful protests, the tone of questions around climate change and lessons that included social emotional learning.

The curriculum with social emotional learning “got nixed pretty quickly,” said Davis, the English teacher leading the committee. Social emotional learning (SEL) — tools and strategies that research shows can help students better grasp academic content — has become a new lightning rod for the far-right across and is often conflated with Critical Race Theory or CRT.

Chris Reid, a banker and vice mayor of Twin Falls and father with seven children in the public schools, said he was eager to help select the new English Language Arts curriculum and make sure materials were “age-appropriate” and not include “revisionist history,” LGBTQ themes or sexuality introduced “to younger-age children.”

“My family and I are very religious,” said Reid, sitting one afternoon in his mezzanine office at First Federal Bank. “My biggest concern as a father was, ‘What are my children going to be reading?’”

Despite some tense conversations, Davis, the teacher, said the process was overall “not threatening.” He also liked the curriculum choice, the myPerspectives textbooks by Savvas Learning Company. He does, however, see risks with the new mandate, including that a parent or community member with an agenda “could hamstring the district from getting the best textbook,” he said. “It could literally be one member of the committee.”

Committee member Anna Rill, a teacher at Canyon Ridge High School, said the difficult conversations about content “made us think a little more about the community you are living in and that you are serving.”

Twin Falls, named for the waterfalls formed by the Snake River Canyon dam, which in the early 1900s turned the area from desert into a rich agricultural region now called “The Magic Valley,” is politically conservative (70 percent voted for Donald Trump in 2020). L.H. Erickson, director of secondary programs for the school district, said he thought the curriculum “should meet the values and ideals of your community.”

Increasing public involvement makes good sense because schools must be responsive to parent views, said Erickson. “Parents give us their children for several hours a day and a lot of trust and we want to make sure to earn and keep that trust.”

Reid, the father of seven, liked being able to share his. “I got to hear other perspectives; they got to understand my side on the content,” he said. The experience led him to conclude that, “teachers are not evil. They are not trying to indoctrinate my child.”

Related: States were adding lessons about Native American history. Then came the anti-CRT movement

The new law may help to build bridges in Twin Falls and some other communities. But in West Bonner County, which serves about 1,000 students in rural north Idaho, a year-old dispute over an English Language Arts curriculum continues to fuel division.

The blow-up began last summer. In June, before the new law went into effect, the curriculum review committee, which included a few parents, chose the Wonders English Language Arts curriculum from McGraw-Hill. The school board approved it quickly and unanimously. The materials were purchased and delivered. “They were stacked in the hallways,” one parent said.

Then, some local conservative activists loudly objected, saying the materials contained social emotional learning components. In developing the curriculum, McGraw-Hill had partnered with Sesame Workshop to include SEL skills that language on the Wonders site said included “a focus on self-confidence, problem-solving, and pro-social behavior.” At a meeting on Aug. 24, 2022, the school board voted 3-1 to rescind the curriculum.

Because the existing curriculum is out of print, the district lacked a reading program last year.

“We had no spelling lists, no word work. The first unit was on the desert and we live in north Idaho,” said Whitney Urmann, who taught fourth grade last year at West Bonner County School District’s Priest Lake Elementary School. “Very early on, I stopped using the curriculum,” Urmann said.

She had two workbooks for her entire class and few books leveled to her students’ abilities. Other materials were incomplete or irrelevant, she said. From mid-October on, she said, she purchased materials herself, spending $2,000 of her $47,000 salary to be able to teach reading.

The board’s decision, said Margaret Hall, the board member who cast the dissenting vote, “has created some ill feelings.” Indeed: Two board members who voted to rescind the curriculum now face a recall after parents gathered enough signatures on petitions to force a vote.

Shouting at one school board meeting in June went on for nearly four hours.

The dispute, and the subsequent absence of teaching materials, has upset some local parents.

Hailey Scott, a mother of three, said she worries that her child entering first grade, an advanced reader, won’t “be challenged.” Meanwhile, her third grader is behind in reading, said Scott, “and I fear she will be set back even more by not having a state-approved curriculum in her classroom.”

Whitney Hutchins, who grew up in the district and works at the Priest Lake resort her family has owned and operated for generations, recently decided with her husband to move across the state line to Spokane, Washington.

“This is not the environment I want to raise my child in,” said Hutchins, mother of an 18-month-old. She said the curriculum law is part of a larger problem of extremists gaining control and destroying civic institutions.

“It is scary to me that 50 percent of people choosing the curriculum are not going to be teachers,” she said. “It is scary to me that it is going to be people with a political agenda who don’t believe in public education.”

Hutchins doesn’t see things improving. The school board, on a 3-2 vote, chose Branden Durst — who was previously a senior analyst at the far-right Idaho Freedom Foundation and has no educational experience — as the district’s new superintendent over Susie Luckey, the interim superintendent and a veteran educator in the district.

Durst said that he wanted the job because of the district’s challenges, including around curriculum. “I have a lot of ideas that are frankly unorthodox in education. I needed to prove to myself that those things are right,” he said. Those ideas could include using a curriculum developed by the conservative Christian Hillsdale College, he said.

Durst is currently assembling a new committee with plans to quickly adopt a new English Language Arts curriculum, but declined to share details.

“It is scary to me that 50 percent of people choosing the curriculum are not going to be teachers. It is scary to me that it is going to be people with a political agenda who don’t believe in public education.”

Whitney Hutchins, mother who recently decided to leave Twin Falls for Spokane, Washington

Jessica Rogers, who served on the committee that picked the Wonders curriculum, said she saw hints of trouble long before the vote to reject the curriculum. She said the curriculum adoption committee anticipated political attacks, including over images that showed racial diversity. “One of the things we did was go through the curriculum and see where the first blond-haired, blue-eyed boy was,” she recalled, adding that they noted pages to use as a defense.

It was, she said, “bizarre.”

Rogers and her husband recently built a home atop a hill with a broad view of Chase Lake. As her three daughters had a water fight on the patio, she hoped aloud that building in the West Bonner County School District was not a mistake.

This story about curriculum reviews was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post Who picks school curriculum? Idaho law hands more power to parents appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

By Jaymie Baxley

Two organizations that manage behavioral health services for people with Medicaid and for some uninsured people in different areas of North Carolina have agreed to merge into a single entity that will serve more than 100,000 people across 21 counties. 

Eastpointe, an organization that coordinates care for low-income residents in 10 eastern counties, on Thursday said it intends to consolidate with the Sandhills Center, which operates in 11 southwestern counties. The consolidated entity is expected to be the second-largest of its kind in the state “based on population,” according to a news release from Eastpointe.

Sandhills Center and Eastpointe are part of a network that currently consists of six state-supported managed care agencies, commonly called LME-MCOs, that serve people with mental health needs, substance use disorders and intellectual or developmental disabilities. These people tend to require more extensive care and support than the average Medicaid participant.

The LME-MCOs play a critical role in the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services’ vision for the future of Medicaid, which includes moving many of the residents served by the agencies onto specialized health care plans that are tailored to their complex needs. DHHS had originally hoped to launch the tailored plans in December 2022. After multiple delays, the department announced last month that the rollout would be postponed indefinitely to give the LME-MCOs more time to prepare for the transition. 

In a statement to NC Health News on Friday, DHHS said the decision to delay the launch of tailored plans was “influenced in part by the need to ensure LME/MCOs readiness and focus on providing services to populations they are best positioned to manage successfully.”

“Ensuring that all North Carolinians have access to quality whole-person health care is central to the Department’s mission,” a DHHS spokeswoman said in an email. “This is especially true when it comes to management of the Medicaid Tailored Plans that will serve people with complex behavioral health conditions, Intellectual/Developmental Disabilities and traumatic brain injury.”

The spokeswoman added that DHHS will “evaluate the intent to consolidate” Sandhills Center with Eastpointe, and “work with the entities on a path forward that best serves improving outcomes for the people of our state.”

‘The best opportunity’

The department has said about 150,000 people, or 5 percent of the state’s Medicaid participants, will eventually be moved to tailored plans. The LME-MCOs will be responsible for coordinating care for tailored-plan enrollees by acting as intermediaries between patients and providers, who will work under contract with the agencies.

In the news release announcing the consolidation agreement, Sarah Stroud, CEO of Eastpointe, said combining with Sandhills Center will “give us an unmatched ability to deliver quality benefits and support our provider partners while also meeting the objectives of the state’s policymakers.” Stroud will also serve as CEO of the consolidated entity, which has not yet been named.

Anthony Ward, who earlier this year became CEO of Sandhills Center, added that consolidation “offers the best opportunity to preserve local management of services for individuals in our communities.” In an email to NC Health News, Ward said he will serve as executive vice president of the consolidated organization.

No layoffs are expected in connection with the consolidation. The new entity will employ nearly 900 people and oversee a budget of about $1.4 billion, according to the news release. It will be based out of Sandhills Center’s facility in the Moore County town of West End.

In addition to Moore, the Sandhills Center covers Anson, Davidson, Guilford, Harnett, Hoke, Lee, Montgomery, Randolph, Richmond and Rockingham counties. Eastpointe covers Duplin, Edgecombe, Greene, Lenoir, Robeson, Sampson, Scotland, Warren, Wayne and Wilson counties. 

The boards of Eastpointe and Sandhills Center, which are made up of 19 commissioners from the agencies’ respective counties, will be condensed into a single board. The consolidated organization will “draw about half of its board members from each LME-MCO,” according to the news release. 

Harry Southerland, a Hoke County commissioner who chairs the Sandhills Center board, said the agreement “presents a tremendous opportunity to promote superior services to our members and meet the goals of the Department of Health and Human Services and our legislature.” 

His comments were echoed by Jerry Jones, a Greene County commissioner who chairs the Eastpointe board. Consolidation, Jones said, “ensures our approach to service delivery reaches more members at exactly the right time as North Carolina looks to expand its Medicaid program.”

The proposed consolidation must still be approved by DHHS. In its statement to NC Health News, the department said it does not know how long that will take.

“Without having seen the specific proposal at this time, it is hard for NCDHHS to comment on the consolidation,” the department said.

The last consolidation of an LME-MCO occurred after the demise of Charlotte-based Cardinal Innovations in 2021, after a series of spending scandals and dissatisfaction with the organization’s services expressed by commissioners in multiple member counties.

If approved, the new consolidation will reduce the number of LME-MCOs in North Carolina to five. The other agencies are Alliance Health, Partners Health Management, Trillium Health Resources and Vaya Health.

The post Mental health agencies agree to consolidate amid delayed launch of specialized Medicaid plans appeared first on North Carolina Health News.

Federal regulators are urging Montana health officials to fix shortcomings in the state’s Medicaid redetermination process, expressing “concerns” that the state may be disenrolling people who are eligible for the public health insurance and creating barriers for others through long wait times at call centers and during the application process.

The state began reassessing the eligibility of the more than 320,000 people on Montana Medicaid in April with the lifting of the federally-designated COVID-19 public health emergency, which barred states from removing people from the program during the pandemic. The state has since reported removing 34,204 people from the rolls in April and May, roughly half of all people reviewed. Data for June is still pending.

In an August 9 letter addressed to Montana’s Medicaid Director Mike Randol, an official with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said the state’s May data showed an average call center wait time of 42 minutes and an average call abandonment of 40%. Those metrics are among the worst in the country — only Missouri had a longer average wait time of 48 minutes and a slightly higher drop rate. Nevada had a dropped call rate of 56%.

Both of Montana’s call metrics have worsened since March and April when the state reported an average wait time of 37 minutes and 35% of calls abandoned.

The federal agency also flagged the 36% of Montanans reviewed in May who lost coverage because of procedural errors such as failing to return paperwork or submit all the required information. Many of those individuals, including children, could still be eligible for the health insurance program, the letter said. 

“While CMS expects procedural terminations, a high rate of procedural terminations may indicate that beneficiaries may not be receiving notices, are unable to understand them, or are unable to submit their renewal through the required modalities,” the agency said.

The letter also indicated that 15% of the income-based applicants who recently applied for Medicaid took the state longer than 45 days to process, “exceeding the regulatory requirements.” The notice said that expeditious processing of new applications, including some who may be re-applying after realizing they lost coverage, was “imperative.”

Out of 50 states that received letters about their recent data, the news site Politico reported that thirty-six were notified of at least one concern about call center wait times, application processing, or procedural disenrollments. Only five states — Montana, Florida, Rhode Island, Alaska and New Mexico — were dinged for all three categories.

In response to a request for comment on the federal letter, Department of Public Health and Human Services spokesperson Jon Ebelt said Friday that the department has been trying to simplify the phone tree options at call centers, adjust staffing levels and modifying its call-back protocol to prioritize enrollees who are most at risk of losing coverage. The department will also be starting a public service announcement campaign “in the coming weeks” that Ebelt said would run through the duration of the redetermination process, slated to end in January 2024. 

“CMS sent helpful feedback to states this week,” Ebelt said. “We continue to closely monitor, evaluate, and strengthen our Medicaid redetermination process with a laser focus on ensuring coverage for eligible Montanans.”

The health department in November awarded a more-than-$2.25 million contract to Public Consulting Group LLC, a private contractor, to boost staffing levels for processing Medicaid renewals. On its website, PCG said it has allocated 40 staff to the contract. 

Asked how the recent disenrollment and call center data highlighted by CMS reflect Gov. Greg Gianforte’s stated commitment to “customer service” from state agencies, Deputy Communications Director Brooke Metrione said the governor “has full confidence in DPHHS as it undertakes the overdue Medicaid redetermination process, ensuring eligible Montanans maintain their coverage while guarding against fraud, waste, and abuse of taxpayer resources.”

In recent months, advocates for Medicaid enrollees and Democratic lawmakers have called on Gianforte and the health department to pause redeterminations until the state can resolve issues leading to high rates of procedural terminations. The Montana Budget and Policy Center and Montana Women Vote, groups that lobby on behalf of low-income Montanans, reiterated that stance in a July letter to CMS. The outreach recounted reports of long call center wait times, confusion about the process and sudden disenrollments.

“Given the serious and endemic nature of these issues, we believe that the large number of Montanans being disenrolled includes a high percentage of people who have not had a fair and timely redetermination process and who may still be eligible for coverage. We believe the state should consider pausing or slowing the rate of redetermination until these issues can be addressed,” the letter said. One of the signatories was Rep. SJ Howell, D-Missoula, who works as executive director of Montana Women Vote.

In addition to the 71,930 enrollees reevaluated in April and May, the department began reevaluating the eligibility of another 38,372 people in June, according to its public dashboard. About 21% of that group had had their coverage renewed as of the dashboard’s last update in mid-July. Other applications are still being processed and roughly 45% of people under review hadn’t responded to the department’s requests for information. 

The department has said it plans to update the dashboard once a month.

Editor’s note: This story was updated on Aug. 11 to include a response from the state health department. 

The post Federal regulators flag ‘concerns’ as Montana cuts Medicaid rolls appeared first on Buffalo’s Fire.

As students prepare to return to campus, painful cuts to degree programs and faculty positions at West Virginia University are on the horizon as administrators work to fix a $45 million budget deficit.

At this moment, almost half of the faculty are waiting to find out whether they will still have a job in a year or need to find work elsewhere. 

Based on enrollment trends and revenue, many degree programs across the campus are having to prove to administrators that they will be able to attract students and valuable tuition dollars in the years to come.

The process is expected to be finished by mid-fall and will result in some tenured professors being laid off as programs are downsized or eliminated.

“Please understand how demoralizing, heartbreaking, and scary it is to think you are secure in your faculty position only to now live in fear every day that it will be cut,” wrote a faculty member in a public comment — one of almost two hundred submitted in response to a recently proposed rule changes that will make it easier to lay off faculty. 

In one letter to the board, dozens of professors said that the way in which the layoffs are being done will make it difficult to recruit faculty, undermine academic freedom, imperil WVU’s research efforts and ultimately hurt students.

Here’s what you need to know.

Why is there a budget crisis at WVU?

Student enrollment, the single biggest source of revenue through tuition, has steadily declined over the past decade and is expected to continue going down. Today, around 5,000 fewer students are enrolled – and paying tuition – than in 2014.

The enrollment decline started before the COVID-19 pandemic but was exacerbated by it. Both in West Virginia and nationwide, fewer high school seniors are choosing to attend college than before the pandemic. 

At WVU, a long-term budget problem became an immediate budget crunch after the university enrolled smaller freshmen classes during the pandemic and administrators underestimated how many students would graduate in spring of 2022. More students left than were coming in, and tuition revenue went down.

WVU’s budget situation is also closely tied to actions by state lawmakers. Public funding has gone down over the last decade, forcing the university to become more dependent on tuition revenue, according to analysis from the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy. 

While both enrollment and state funding have declined, expenses have increased. Changes made by lawmakers earlier this year to the state health insurance plan will cost the university $10 million more next year. Inflation and higher wages have also affected the budget, according to administrators.

“At the end of the day, we’ve dropped enrollment,” Rob Alsop, vice president for strategic initiatives, said during a meeting with faculty earlier this summer. “Our expenses are up. Our state appropriations are not going to save us. And we’ve got to figure out a pathway collectively forward.”

What is WVU going to do about its budget deficit?

In March, WVU administrators announced the $45 million budget shortfall and quickly began a review of degree programs. By mid-summer, almost half were placed “under review” based on enrollment and revenue.

The list includes the law school, the education program, the creative arts college, the public health school, the pharmacy school, the math program, some engineering programs and more.

Faculty and leaders have defended their programs and made the case for why they should be kept. In light of the enrollment and revenue data collected by top administrators, leadership from each program have recently submitted plans detailing current and future efforts to increase enrollment and reduce costs.

Closing or shrinking programs and the resulting layoffs are the latest — and most drastic — cost-cutting measure that WVU has asked faculty to go through.

Since 2020, administrators have been looking to cut costs through a process that they’ve called “Academic Transformation.” Prior to the current review, they have merged two pairs of colleges and restructured other programs.

At the beginning of this year, budget officials implemented a hiring freeze and stopped spending on supplies, employee hospitality and travel in most situations. Printing on physical paper was specifically discouraged.

Who is to blame for the budget crisis? Who will fix it?

In a state with a declining college-going rate and poor economic conditions, several external factors have contributed to the crisis. 

President E. Gordon Gee, who just had his contract renewed through 2025 by the university’s governing board and says he plans to step down afterwards, has presented the budget cuts as a necessary step to continue attracting students to a smaller institution. 

“My friends, we have been overgrown for a very long time,” he said in a March address to faculty and students. 

After Gee was chosen as WVU’s president in 2014, he pledged to increase enrollment to 40,000 students, an increase of several thousand students. Enrollment has steadily gone down since and is now around 26,000. 

Administrators have been in the driver’s seat during this crisis. They’ve decided when to release information, changed rules to make it easier to lay off faculty members and, ultimately, will decide who to cut. 

Faculty acknowledge that the budget crisis must be dealt with but have sharply criticized the speed and manner in which cuts are being made. Several times, faculty members have asked why highly-paid senior administrators are not taking pay cuts to help with the crisis.

Alsop, who oversees much of the university’s business operations, has said that this would be bad for morale and make it difficult to recruit future job candidates.

How does this change what WVU will be in a decade?

In a decade, there will likely be fewer faculty, fewer staff and fewer students at WVU. 

Gee has presented a vision of a smaller institution that is focused on programs that students want. He has also frequently emphasized WVU’s health care and research wings as significant parts of the university’s future.

Those areas have grown in recent years with more grant revenue to do research and WVU Medicine’s expansion across the state.

Some high school seniors may find that the program they want to attend no longer exists at WVU. But it’s not clear yet exactly what programs these could be.

On August 14, WVU is expected to release information about which academic programs are on the chopping block and could be downsized or discontinued. Final decisions will be made in September.

West Virginia University faces budget cuts and layoffs. Here’s what to know appeared first on Mountain State Spotlight, West Virginia’s civic newsroom.

Mississippi election officials have made 161 voting precinct changes since November 2022, leaving voters with slightly fewer voting precincts statewide and dozens moved after the completion of post-Census redistricting efforts, a Mississippi Free Press investigation has found.

The post Mississippi Officials Made 161 Voting Precinct Changes Since November 2022 appeared first on Mississippi Free Press.

LUDLOW — Sometime in the afternoon of July 9, Angela Kissell and her husband began knocking on doors in this southern Vermont town, telling residents to prepare for a possible evacuation. She’d been following forecasts of a storm that could bring as much as 5 inches of rain to Ludlow in the next two days, and the possibility of flash floods.

About 12 hours later, at 4:30 a.m. on July 10, Kissell joined other members of the Ludlow Fire Department in evacuating people from a manufactured home park as the Black River engulfed it.

And then, Kissell — who’d been Ludlow’s emergency management director for just two months — asked the municipal government to activate the Ludlow Community Center as an evacuation center.

Within the next 36 hours, dozens of people fled to local emergency shelters as Ludlow was pummeled by the statewide storm, momentarily becoming the storm’s epicenter. Some parts of Ludlow got nearly 8 inches of rain, which caused a massive mudslide downtown, spawned millions of dollars’ worth of damage to homes, businesses, roads, bridges and a state park, and temporarily cut off land access to and from the center of town.

Kissell, 48, said the experience underscored to her the need to come up with a more comprehensive plan for future emergencies in the town of 2,170 residents. “We learned so much,” she said, “that it’s just going to make us that much better for the next ones.”

Though she has been a firefighter in Ludlow since 2017, Kissell only became emergency management director on May 1. During that first day of the flooding, the learning curve was steep.

Stepping up preparations

Before moving to Ludlow with her husband in 2016, Kissell had built a career in mortgage and lending in New Hampshire. She joined the Ludlow Fire Department — where her husband was a firefighter — after seeing the need for more volunteers in a town with an aging population and with majority part-time residents. Only 10% of Ludlow homeowners lived there permanently.

At a Ludlow Selectboard meeting April 3, when Kissell formally expressed interest in becoming the town’s emergency management director, she pointed out that the local emergency operations team had not met in at least four years.

She also said the town had not addressed some emergency issues, such as opening a shelter during a storm last winter, and it needed an emergency director who would step up. She asked if Ludlow was prepared for an emergency.

The town’s longtime emergency management director, Ron Bixby, resigned on May 1. Kissell was appointed to the volunteer position on the same day.

In June, members of the town’s emergency operations team met to discuss their priorities, Kissell said. The following month, the flash floods came.

Kissell said she didn’t immediately have answers to several pressing questions as the natural disaster unfolded: What kind of support did local emergency responders need? How could they search homes cut off by the flooding? How can town workers immediately assess road conditions?

“We had no policies or procedures in place … I had nothing to go by,” she said. “I felt like I was a little dependent on all these other people who’ve been in their roles much longer than I have.” But it was Kissell who was leading the town’s emergency operations team, which includes the fire and police chiefs, town manager and head dispatcher. 

Kissell said the local emergency management plan consisted mainly of lists, such as emergency contact personnel, shelter locations and town equipment. 

Ludlow’s emergency operations team is currently assessing its next steps. The municipal manager, Brendan McNamara, said members will be holding more debriefings on the flood response and reaction. 

“The plan will be tailored to what becomes of those meetings,” said McNamara, who was appointed to his position in April.

State Rep. Logan Nicoll, D-Ludlow, said he was satisfied with the town’s emergency response to the flooding. “I thought everything went as well as it could have,” he said. “It was a difficult situation.”

‘Two flood-zone towns’

Kissell balances her emergency management role in Ludlow with her day job as town clerk in neighboring Plymouth, where she also serves as a firefighter. She missed two office days because of her flooding response work.

“When I came back up here, I felt really overwhelmed,” Kissell said outside the Plymouth Town Office this week. “I feel like I’m in two flood-zone towns.”

A portion of Plymouth, which is located about 10 miles north of Ludlow, was battered by 9 inches of rain during the July storm, according to data from the National Weather Service. Several homes were damaged and some culverts were washed out, but Kissell said local roads and bridges took the hardest hit: $3.36 million worth of necessary repairs.

In the flooding aftermath, shel said, Plymouth residents have been calling her office to ask which damaged roads have been reopened and where to get test kits to check their well water. Others, with tax season upon them, inquired about their property tax bills.

But being the emergency management director in Ludlow has helped her gain knowledge that has come in handy at the clerk’s office. For instance, in Ludlow, she developed a list of emergency contacts and resources — with the state government, Red Cross, Federal Emergency Management Agency — that she has shared in Plymouth.

Kissell said she sees a lot of work ahead as Ludlow’s emergency management director, but the July flooding gave her a crash course. She plans to write a step-by-step evacuation plan, gather supplies for emergency shelters in advance and prepare resources to guide residents in the post-calamity recovery.

“We’ll be better next time,” she said, “because there will be a next time.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: ‘There will be a next time’: Ludlow emergency management director gears up for future calamities.

A partir de este año los votantes deberán presentar una identificación del estado para poder votar, y existe una lista de identificaciones válidas que pueden presentar, pero dos de ellas (licencia de manejar e identificación estatal) requieren ir a una oficina del NCDMV

La entrada Votantes en áreas rurales: con menor acceso a un ID para votar en 2023 se publicó primero en Enlace Latino NC.